Making Your Own Pasta Sauce

tasha

tasha

Community Member
Nov 12, 2014
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In order to make "Mama's" pasta sauce you need to have the patience to slice the garlic very thin, chop the onions correctly and most importantly you need to ensure that you have all the right ingredients; celery, carrots and onion are the base of your sauce and if you don't like herbs then don't cook Italian!!
What is the secret to your sauce?
 
I don't really have any secret to my sauce? Well no, I use Herbamare?
By far the most popular of the A.Vogel condiments, Herbamare has been a staple in Europe for decades. A brilliant blend of celery, leek, watercress, onions, chives, parsley, lovage, garlic, basil, marjoram, rosemary, thyme, and kelp, all organically grown.
Herbamare Original replaces dreary conventional table salt. Use it as a condiment to perk up your recipes or at every meal to salt your food the healthy way. Add after cooking to enhance taste!
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I don't just use it in my sauce, I use it for other things too. Like cooking chicken, or turkey burgers, and etc. Just to make things taste better in general.
 
Oh I have never heard of that and will be on the lookout for it. I like using herbs but mostly the fresh ones as they taste so much better unfortunately we cant keep them for too long and you often don't find them, so good to know that you can buy it like the one in your picture
 
Ha ha good advice! I tried to tell my fiancee that, she is not a fan of herbs. My secret ingredients would have to be a dash of sherry and a couple of squares of dark chocolate. They both might sound a bit odd but the sherry adds a fruity hint and the chocolate really adds some depth to the flavour.
 
I think for the perfect pasta sauce you definitely need to use passata as a base. It is a very rich flavor and is very easy to work with. When I make pasta, I use garlic, onion and carrot, with a mix of ground herbs. After this I think it is just preference. I like my pasta sauce to have a spice to it, so I use chilli powder with mine. It is best to use a medium to hot powder as it works better!

You can add what you want to it really, some people prefer a thick sauce, so you could fill it with more vegetables and add tomatoes to it, but I love spicy food!
 
Patience and a good pan is my secret. Plus as I don't like tomato skin or seeds I take time to make sure they aren't in the sauce. It does make it look smoother and I like a dash of chilli flakes in mine and plenty of black pepper. To keep it thick, you simmer with a good pan with a clear lid and keep testing it.
 
I don't think I should be making sauces on my own. I don't trust myself with all these new ideas about enhancing the sauces. I would prefer buying ready-made sauces. Anyway, if I'm just cooking for myself, I would be satisfied with sauces that are cheap to make, and it should be cheesy. Those are a must when cooking for myself. But for the family, nothing too cheap and nothing too cheesy.
 
What I've found helpful is getting the right blend of spices. Then the patience to do the chopping, then additional patience to let everything sit on the pot so all the flavours blend nicely. There are a lot of recipes out there, and family tips and techniques also get passed down. My sauces usually taste different, but always good.

Always good, sometimes better, I guess.
 
Don't use pre-chopped tomatoes. They seem to loose their taste and the sauce becomes kind of sour. Use whole canned (or fresh) tomatoes and chop them yourselves. Also, wine and a pinch of sugar does wonders!
 
Pessel said:
I don't think I should be making sauces on my own. I don't trust myself with all these new ideas about enhancing the sauces. I would prefer buying ready-made sauces. Anyway, if I'm just cooking for myself, I would be satisfied with sauces that are cheap to make, and it should be cheesy. Those are a must when cooking for myself. But for the family, nothing too cheap and nothing too cheesy.
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I think a good tomato sauce should be simple, though. You don't really need to enhance it. You get some veggies, some tomatoes, some herbs, and if you want maybe some more ingredients. Press your index finger, middle finger, and thumb together and yell something in Italian and let the sauce cook slowly. That's the beauty of Italian food.
 
I'm so glad someone else mentioned Sherry! LOL. I was surprised how good it is in a pasta sauce too and I stumbled upon it by accident. I had bought a bottle of dry Sherry to use in some Asian recipes (it's a common substitution for Rice Wine, which I can never find in my neck of the woods). I put some Dry Sherry and some Butter - the flavors of the two work so well together with the tomato sauce. I'm very tempted to try out the dark chocolate too now.

Some other alternatives to the usual red wine, would be Dry Vermouth or a White Wine. I actually prefer these over red wine since they don't overpower the sauce if you accidentally pour too much. And the Vermouth in particular, being an infused wine, adds some more complexity to the overall flavor of the sauce.

Aside from that, I seldom do the carrot/celery thing in my sauce for a few reasons. No matter how finely I chop either and no matter how long I cook the sauce, they never seem to completely soften, and the sauce winds up having hard bits in it. The other reason is too much of either, particularly the celery, can make the sauce taste more like a bloody mary mix, or a can of V8.

I mash my garlic through a garlic press and grate my onion finely so both melt into the sauce. The other thing is I take my time cooking both in a lot of extra virgin olive oil over a gentle heat, along with the red pepper flakes and a pinch of salt and pepper, and any dried herbs if I plan on using them, so they can really infuse the oil and completely soften before getting browned. I don't rush this step at all.
 
Kitty Reeves said:
I don't really have any secret to my sauce? Well no, I use Herbamare?


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I don't just use it in my sauce, I use it for other things too. Like cooking chicken, or turkey burgers, and etc. Just to make things taste better in general.
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Herbamare is great, but not for tomato sauce. Canned tomatoes usually contains a lot of salt already, so using even more salt is just overkill. But your experience may vary, I suppose.
 
OliveOil said:
Herbamare is great, but not for tomato sauce. Canned tomatoes usually contains a lot of salt already, so using even more salt is just overkill. But your experience may vary, I suppose.
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Well, I grew up in a house with people who would eat a LOT of salt and add salt to everything. There's a running joke that my uncle would probably just eat a plate of salt straight, and put even more salt on it!

But I generally only put a small amount of Herbamare. Roughly a teaspoon or so?
 
Does anyone know if this Herbamare is available anywhere in the US without having to have it shipped overseas? I wouldn't mind trying it out to see what type of flavor it adds, but I wouldn't want to spend an arm and a leg to have a small bottle of seasoning shipped to me either.

After looking over the ingredient list, it sort of reminds me a bit of something like Morton's Nature's Seasonings blend or Janes Krazy Mixed Up Salt. Both are herbal seasoned salt blends, but meant to be a bit more mild for items such as veggies, chicken or seafood - without all the heavy spices you see in stuff meant for steaks and beef and pork.

The Kelp, I'm assuming, is basically their way of including MSG into the mix without having to explicitly label it as such and scare people away. Kelp is a seaweed that has an acid in it which is very similar to MSG itself. I've never heard of Lovage before and have no idea what to expect in terms of flavor from it. The Watercress sounds interesting though.

I would also be concerned about how strong the Celery component is, because that's the one thing I've often not cared for in other blends - when they have a much too overpowering Celery taste to them. For some reason, the dried Celery in spices always tastes very pungent and artificial to me.
 
OhioTom76 said:
Does anyone know if this Herbamare is available anywhere in the US without having to have it shipped overseas? I wouldn't mind trying it out to see what type of flavor it adds, but I wouldn't want to spend an arm and a leg to have a small bottle of seasoning shipped to me either.

After looking over the ingredient list, it sort of reminds me a bit of something like Morton's Nature's Seasonings blend or Janes Krazy Mixed Up Salt. Both are herbal seasoned salt blends, but meant to be a bit more mild for items such as veggies, chicken or seafood - without all the heavy spices you see in stuff meant for steaks and beef and pork.

The Kelp, I'm assuming, is basically their way of including MSG into the mix without having to explicitly label it as such and scare people away. Kelp is a seaweed that has an acid in it which is very similar to MSG itself. I've never heard of Lovage before and have no idea what to expect in terms of flavor from it. The Watercress sounds interesting though.

I would also be concerned about how strong the Celery component is, because that's the one thing I've often not cared for in other blends - when they have a much too overpowering Celery taste to them. For some reason, the dried Celery in spices always tastes very pungent and artificial to me.
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You could check Amazon. I'm sure some company imports it.
 
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